Old Turkic

Old Turkic

the language of the ancient Turkic peoples of Asia. Old Turkic is represented by various records dating from the fifth to the 11th centuries, including inscriptions on tombstones of Tonyukuk, Bilgä Kagan, Kültegin, and Gudulu Kagan (written in so-called Turkic runes) and manuscripts that are Manichaean and Buddhist in content, such as The Penitential Prayer of the Manichaeans (in the Uighur alphabet).

The Old Turkic written records display many common, specific linguistic features, including the correspondence, in medial and final word position, of d/t to the sounds z/s and j of the later languages; the consonant clusters lt, rt, and nt at the juncture of a stem and an affix (usually ld, rd, and nd, respectively, in the modern languages); the dialect variations s and š ; and the accusative case form -g, -ig/-ïg.

Gabain considers the Old Turkic suffix -k/q to be an intensive form (1950: 82); Kormusin (1978: 42) speaks of an intensive-causative suffix.

Turkic forms like Old Turkic jasil, Turkish jesil, Uyghur yesil, Kazakh Jasil, all meaning 'green' are not related to either the Tungusic or Mongolic forms cited by the authors; they go rather with such Tungusic forms as Evenki nalikin 'moist, green (of wood, i.

In the Old Turkic inscriptions he is usually called Qapghan, while in Chinese he is usually called Mochuo; Chinese chuo is undeniably Turkic cor, but the equivalency of Chinese mo and Turkic bag is less certain (although possible, particularly given the Tibetan evidence of the form 'Bug-chor).

Among their topics are the role of verbal morphology in established genealogical relations among languages, identifying the language of an unintelligible Scandinavian runic inscription, inclusive and exclusive in Altaic languages, gerunds in the Old Turkic and Mongol versions of "The Hungry Tigress," and enclitic zero verbs in some Eurasian languages.

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